Last Week in Digital Marketing News – Feb. 13, 2017

- February 13, 2017

Digital Marketing News is everywhere. How can you sift through the deluge of headlines and extract what is most important to you? Each Monday, our experts curate the biggest stories in Digital Marketing News from the past week and tell you how they will affect you and your business.

Facebook is really trying to regain any confidence lost via its recent struggles with streaming metrics. They’ve offered to bring in an independent third-party auditor and have begun monitoring streaming content by the millisecond to ensure the most accurate data for streaming. With the amount of competition they’re facing from other social media platforms, they want to get a handle on this as fast as possible.

Bill Slawski is an attorney and a search engine expert. He combines these two skill sets by researching patents applied for by Google and then trying to look for real-world applications for those patents. By looking at what Google is trying to do, Bill finds connections to the SERPs, making educated guesses as to the causes.

His latest research looks at a recent Google patent and its implications for sites with spammy or questionable links. It looks as though a recent algorithm update was made that affected sites with links for blog networks and other questionable sources.

Google’s Gary Ilyes confirms via Tweet that despite PageRank no longer being listed in the Google Toolbar, the search giant still uses the venerable (and mysterious) metric for internal data. Since there was little confirmation of how PR worked when it was a public metric, the knowledge that it still may influence ranking, even indirectly, doesn’t provide SEOs with any new angles. But, it does confirm that many best practices that attempted to affect PageRank are still valid, even if we’re not certain exactly how much weight they carry.

Come back every Monday to get all the Digital Marketing News you need in 90 seconds. See you next week!